Former CIA agent Teddy Faye is working as a stunt man on an action film for Centurion Studios in Hollywood when the female lead, Tessa Bachetti, comes to him with a problem. Someone is threatening to release a compromising video taken without Tessa's knowledge during her student days at Oxford that could ruin her career, unless she agrees to vote her shares in Centurion stock in favor of those who are seeking a hostile takeover of the studio at the next shareholders meeting. Teddy sets out to identify and take out those behind the scheme, who burn down his house and otherwise try to eliminate him.

Cleveland, 2003. A young man is just a college freshman when he meets Emily: They share a passion for Edward Albee and Ecstasy and fall hard and fast in love. But soon Emily has to move home to Elba, New York and he flunks out of school and joins the Army. Desperate to keep their relationship alive, they marry before he ships out to Iraq. But as an Army medic, he is unprepared for the grisly reality that awaits him. He and Emily try to make their long-distance marriage work, but when he returns from Iraq, his PTSD is profound, and soon he is hooked on heroin. He and Emily attempt a normal life, but with their money drying up, he turns to the one thing he thinks he could be really good at--robbing banks.

Harvard librarian Hester Thursby knows that even in the digital age, people still need help finding things. Using her research skills, Hester runs a side business tracking down the lost. Usually, she's hired to find long-ago prom dates or to reunite adopted children and birth parents. Her new case, however, is finding the handsome and charismatic Sam Blaine. Trouble is, Sam has no desire to be found. As Hester's investigation closes in on a brutal truth, Hester may unknowingly jeopardize her own safety.

Anna, whose mother left when she was a child, grew up close to her father Noel, who she believed to be a banker. The day before her wedding to musical wunderkind Jake in Switzerland, Noel goes skiing and dies in an avalanche, so Anna dispenses with party plans and marries in jeans as she grieves. Jake, a natural charmer who wants to change the world, sells the music business he established and pivots to politics, an area in which Anna's father's past becomes problematic.

Meet Lee Isaacs, esq., a criminal-defense attorney in Boulder, Colorado. Lee’s new case involves a teenage boy who’s accused of murdering a gay man. You’d think the kid would be eager to have a veteran like Lee handling his defense, but no: he’s already confessed to the crime, and he’s not interested in fighting the charge in court. The obvious question: Why? What secrets could the boy be keeping, if he thinks a long stretch in prison for a crime he may well not have committed is his best course of action?

Every morning, in the fog on her bathroom mirror, Boston journalist Mercer Hennessey writes down the number of days since the car accident that killed her husband and three-year-old daughter. Then her close friend, editor Katherine Crafts, offers Mercer a project to both distract her and provide income: write an instant book about the seemingly certain conviction of Ashlyn Bryant, a young woman standing trial for murdering her two-year-old daughter. Plans go awry when Ashlyn is unexpectedly acquitted, but Katherine rebounds with a different book in mind: the story of Ashlyn's redemption, as told to Mercer.